That’s important because embedding is how videos get distributed beyond the YouTube website itself — that’s how we can share YouTube videos in our VentureBeat articles, for example.

And the change could be especially significant for mobile users, since YouTube’s old format, Flash, isn’t supported on most smartphones. (That’s starting to change on some devices, but not on the iPhone.) Right now, if you view a website with an embedded video on your phone, it will either show up as an error message, or clicking on it will open the separate YouTube app, rather than playing directly on the page. Eventually, the new embed code will allow those HTML5 videos to play on phones too, so no more error messages.